


community

by starlingale



Series: an alien mind formed by interaction with humans [3]
Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: F/M, Post-Movie, happy end detailed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-20 13:06:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13718319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlingale/pseuds/starlingale
Summary: Hippies being what they are, sighting of a fish-man wouldn't be taken seriously by anyone, even if the Asset's existence hadn't been edited out of all official documents.





	community

For the outsiders, they are just another hippy commune, although at least of the kind that actually does good work for sustaining itself. They have gardens to cultivate in opaque ways (especially for visitors who don't pay attention to the intricate organizational charts on the wall of the dining hall), a fish farm, a workshop that seems to be run by a smaller gang of women in greasy work-clothes, and their artisans make both pleasing trinkets and good, sturdy necessities. 

They do have their artists too, of course. Giles's particular kind of retro-infused sensibilities, for example, are proving popular for a particular niche, especially since he is perfectly happy to bounce the older elements off imagery that people are beginning to call psychedelic. He is also prone of taking sickly-sweet images from the collective hallucination created by ad agencies in the fifties and shifting it just enough to make space for interesting new dissonances and harmonies. 

Their theatre group attracts viewers from several towns around, and the yearly festival they organize fills their barns with activity, their land with tents and their haylofts with long-haired visitors in sleeping bags. 

The people who visit them for spectacles year-round don't find anything strange about the woman with the beautiful shawls who talks with her hands. The hippies are sometimes mischievous with their secret hand language, which can annoy the outsiders, but they understand that since word got out about their signing skills, they have a steady drip of new people who prefer signing to words, some of whom have been forced into making sounds at any price, and for them signing becomes the true second language of the group. And shawls are far from being the most eccentric kind of clothing worn around here - hey, on larger public events, sometimes a tall ghost in fine tie-dyed muslin makes an appearance, with goggles sewn right into his costume. They are used to strange. 

What they know her from is the mean step-dance routine she does with the local band sometimes, with glowing silver shoes flying around in precise, intricate rythms.

The locals get along well with their strange neighbours, all in all, and they understand that they have their calmer periods, when visitors are not welcome. They give them the courtesy of polite distance, when asked for. After all, they can still meet any friends over in the next village's bars.

What the neighbours have no idea about is the life of the River God (whom no one can recall why is called Charlie around here - but hell, it sure is a more convenient name than "the mysterious being we keep in secret from all outsiders, ssssh"). He is a pillar of the community, sharing the role of healer with their young doctor, and is beloved by everybody. They protect him. It doesn't take too much effort to filter the newcomers in their calm periods, to make them distrust their eyes in favor of whatever explanation they have agreed on in their long meetings (altough they are getting better at managing themselves now, with moderators and fast hand signals and delegating whatever a smaller group can work on). The river couple's yearly vacation is put at the time of the festival, so the community can sustain its image as transparent, while their gilled friends enjoy the peace and solitude of the slightly-saltier water beyond their river's delta. They swim and hunt, read and lay absolutely passively under the sun, and have lazy sex on tiny islands made of silt, the kind that appears and disappears following the river's whims. They spend days at a time underwater, free from even the most benevolent of society's inconveniences. If they had to live like this all year, they would become lonely, but having a corner of wilderness to return to feels just as good as having a community to go home to afterwards.

The festival's date is chosen so it coincides with the season of best weather and easiest hunting.

Hippies being what they are, sighting of a fish-man wouldn't be taken seriously by anyone, even if the Asset's existence hadn't been edited out of all official documents. Stickland left no notes about Elisa's implication, chasing her half-mad and wanting all the glory for himself, so her secret went right to his grave. They are safe from all outsiders.

Charlie had got enthusiastic when he found out about finger-spelling, then annoyed when the nature of english spelling got revealed to him, and, after taking the effort to learn to read, the existence of the phonetic alphabet would have felt like the last layer of betrayal if by that time his signs weren't effortless and the community wasn't perfectly adapted for communicating like that, anyway.

Newton, their doctor, has been a star pupil at his university, and it took some major political confrontations for him to get kicked out - still having enough diplomas to get licensed, but with all hopes of an academic career disrupted. For a while, he was thinking about throwing reason away as a whole. He ended up here more or less accidentally, but in Charlie, he found a very eager pupil, and from teacher and student, they have gradually become researchers rushing together towards unexplored domains. Magic is hard to understand, has strict limits and strange mechanisms - but it does have a certain internal logic, and they do have someone who can bring the empirical data to work with. They swim in the enjoyment of pure discovery, of understanding, and over the years, they manage to develop a few rituals that actually work, in a foolproof way. They brainstorm with the finest dreamers and bullshitters they know in the community, invent a set of contradicting explanations, and carefully share them with people in far-away protests and festivals and retreats. They lie about their names and the places they came from. The practices spread, the explanations crash, and after a while actual research emerges on their effects, one that is firmly public and can't be stopped by any agency. 

They had to think very well about what to make public and how, but looking back, their decisions are proving right. His magic is barely enough for helping a community of this size, but with their scientific explorations, he knows that he did help humanity as a whole.

Giles falsifies a new ID for himself, to hide his connection to past events as well as his unrealistic actual age, and he makes one for Elisa in case she needs it in the outside world. He is mostly an artist, enjoying the community (he actually has a sweet little dating pool here, but his platonic ties are also very nourishing for his soul), but sometimes chains of close friends end up transmitting to him some very ethical forgery needs from the civil rights movements going on in their larger world, and his secret skills help make people safe.

Zelda could never leave city life behind, for real, despite the fact that she had said the same about her deadbeat first husband, too - and look at her now. With Duane she can feel supported in a way she hadn't even dreamed about. She makes her appearance at a family vacation every august, and Charlie, together with the community's best shoemaker, makes sure that her feet do not need to be hurting any more.

Elisa loves her friend's kids, but she doesn't miss having her own, and her River God agrees. (He has a sign-name, one that can't be translated in letters, which is what works for them; every outsider's try to name him remains ill-fitting, in endearing ways.) Her lover has a changeable body, so if he doesn't want to be fertile, he isn't. 

He still grieves for his original people. But he is loved and loving, counted on and mattering, to a group that he is part of in a more direct way than ever before.

**Author's Note:**

> Forgive me for I have no idea about american history whatsoever.
> 
> Yes, the story contains a very stealthy AU-Newton Geiszler, because I love him.


End file.
